Knight Redeemed: The Shackled Verities (Book Two) Read online

  The Dyrrak nodded but said nothing.

  Ulfric found his manner unreadable, inscrutable. What kind of game could the Dyrrak leader be playing? Was he so accepting of whatever fate was about to befall him because he believed it was Vaka Aster’s will? Ulfric needed to understand what pushed the man, but Verities were not known to be so inquisitive of their creations.

  He decided to try a sideways tact. “Have you any requests to make of me, Ecclesium?”

  “What request could I make, Great Creator, when you have given us so much?” The Ecclesium’s voice was as steady as a boulder as he continued. “The Empire of Dyrrakium is truly a flourishing land, as our antiquated name Lœdyrrak means. It has remained so since we cut ties to the other Vinnric kingdoms, as compelled by the Nazarian Most High. They diluted and tarnished our faith with petty allegiances to petty ideas. We are purer in our faith and devotion than ever, thanks to the wisdom of the heir of the Sixth Line. Should Vaka Aster will that she be the next ruler here in Dyrrakium, I would not think to question it.”

  Ulfric had used up the last of his patience for varnished diplomacy at Aster Keep and was about to revert to ill-advised bluntness. Safran, to his relief, took up the thread of conversation first. Holding one of Vaka Aster’s Fenestrii in her hand, she channeled her voice through it. “It is a curious thing, is it not, that Knight Nazaria would push Dyrrakium away from the rest of Vinnr in a bid to retain the empire’s purity—but advise the empire to accept blame for crimes against Yor that it didn’t commit?”

  The Dyrrak glanced to her, then his keen eyes did a sweep of the rest of the chamber, landing only briefly on the two bruhawks, who had alighted on either side of the throne at the top of the dais. His features quickly smoothed as he said, “The rest of Dyrrak cares nothing about the accusations of disloyalty and lack of honor made against us. Does a wolf care about the accusations of a mouse? Why would a great empire bother with the sentiments of lessers?”

  “That why she challenged you for rule of Dyrrakium, is it? Didn’t want to see it in the hands of a lesser anymore?” Stave growled, the Dyrrak’s smug judgment of who was greater and who was lesser clearly getting under his skin.

  Not rising to the bait, the Ecclesium said flatly, “You would have to take up the Nazarian’s reasons with her.”

  “You can stake your prettied-up skin on it that I will.”

  “What Knight Thorvíl’s concerns are, I believe,” Safran cut in, “is that Knight Nazaria acted without conferring with the rest of us. Do—”

  She caught herself, and sent through the Mentalios, I’m sorry, Ulfric. I was about to ask him if he knew where Eisa was. He would wonder why I hadn’t asked Vaka Aster.

  We’ve learned her whereabouts. I’ll fill you in momentarily, he sent as he watched the Ecclesium’s face closely, seeing no sign his suspicions had been aroused. They couldn’t afford the Dyrraks to have even the slightest hint of Ulfric’s actions toward Vaka Aster. The Domine Ecclesium struck him as a man who would not react to something he considered “lesser” than himself with mercy or understanding.

  Safran picked up her thread. “Do you, a man of such deep devotion to our creator, agree with Eisa’s decisions?”

  Where are you going with this line of questioning, Safran? Ulfric sent.

  We need to know who we can rely on, she returned. Should Eisa fail to best him and the Ecclesium is elevated above her, a Knight, we need assurance that he and the Dyrraks who follow him will side with us.

  But there is simply no way she would lose.

  Safran’s stare remained leveled on the Ecclesium, but Ulfric could sense her doubt—he felt it too. The Ecclesium seemed too assured, too calm in the face of what could well be his looming death.

  The Ecclesium stared back at Safran. In fact, he’d been appraising her with a hint of something beyond respectful attention since she began speaking, and Stave had clearly noticed.

  “Your eyelids broken, Dyrrak?” he said. “If you need a good wallop to fix them, I can help you there, I can.”

  Bottle that, Ulfric ordered. We cannot afford to start hostilities here.

  Stave’s jaw shut with a click. The Ecclesium carefully contained a smirk, then bowed his head toward Ulfric again. “I will, of course, follow the commands of our maker to the end of all ends.”

  He’d sidestepped Safran’s question, but she was not finished with the man. She paced closer to him, then circled him slowly. She was Ivoryssian but shorter than most. Her eyes fell level with the Dyrrak’s chin, and she would have had to stretch to reach her arms around his barrel chest. Yet as a warrior her combat skills were formidable. Ulfric wondered if the Dyrrak would underestimate her.

  “And what of that thing she created of that Yor woman, Ecclesium? Is a revenant not an affront, an abomination, to the life Vaka Aster has gifted the people of Vinnr?”

  The Ecclesium waited for Safran to come around to his front before glaring at her in a manner that reminded Ulfric too much of Arch Keeper Beatte, the contempt rulers bestowed on those they deemed lower. “As her companions, I would have thought you’d know her mind and actions. What’s curious to me is that she would not trust you with knowledge of the Speaker. The once-Yor woman has been a great gift to Dyrrakium and our safety.”

  Ulfric felt the tides of this line of questioning turning and didn’t like their direction. Safran, let’s adjourn this here. He’ll never answer you directly. It seems he’s been a politician as long as you were.

  And like a politician, we cannot trust him, she responded.

  Slag trusting him. I’m nearly ready to do to him what Eisa has in mind, I am, Stave said. It could be that I like him even less than I ever liked her.

  You don’t have to like him to maintain him as an ally, Mallich replied. So think before speaking next time.

  It took much to rile Mallich. The strain of every moment since the events that had happened at Mount Omina was beginning to show, and something about the Ecclesium’s behavior was increasing the strain, for them all. Would it be best to let Eisa challenge him? Or should they put a stop to it? Ulfric needed time to think. The rays of Halla shining through the window reminded him he barely had any left. The Ecclesium needed to go. Now.

  “Was there anything else, Domine Ecclesium?” he asked in the clipped phrasing he’d adapted as his Vaka Aster voice.

  “You must know,” the Dyrrak said, as if it were obvious. “My thoughts are open to you.”

  Ulfric put a bite behind his words. “Assert yourself, Ecclesium, like a faithful Dyrrak. And speak plainly.”

  “I am sorry if I have displeased you, My Creator.” Moving unhurriedly toward the window, he said, “Perhaps a victory over your enemies will refresh your favor?” and swept his hand toward the fields to the south.

  “Do you mean an invasion?” Ulfric asked, keeping his voice neutral. “I’ve already told you I do not wish for war among the Vinnrics.”

  “Keeping and spreading faith in the sanctity of the Verities will ever be our only purpose, Great Creator. That is what the Dyrrak people mean by dominion, and we will remain prepared to protect our dominion from those who threaten it, always.” He tweaked the word “our” with such subtle emphasis that Ulfric wasn’t sure he’d heard it. The Ecclesium’s voice, smooth with pride and purpose, grew louder. “The force outside Citadel Suprima is the largest ever assembled in the history of Vinnr and at the ready of the right commander.”

  He turned to leave, his long strides covering the floor of the chamber quickly. From the doorway, he spun back and added, “And as we know, faith always spreads faster by force.”

  “And what of allegiance?” Ulfric said.

  For the first time since the Dyrrak had arrived at Vigil Tower, he looked Ulfric in the eyes. “That too, Creator.” With a final glance at the Knights, he said, “Enjoy your refreshments. And may Dyrrakium’s worthiest enjoy a Verity’s blessing at the Conquestum Ecclesium.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Eisa knew she was drea
ming by the way Halla’s light gleamed over her full head of glossy black hair, even the sides, which she’d let grow out of the customary Dyrrak style after being in the Knights for some time.

  She also knew she was dreaming because she was smiling. The innocent, happy grin of a woman experiencing life in the moment, without suffering, without regrets.

  Eisa had not been that woman for seven hundred and fifteen turns.

  Lillias, her own curls like an inferno trailing down her back, danced toward her barefooted on the shore of a secluded lake in the forest spanning from Yor to Ivoryss. The Great Lochanian Forest met the Howling Weald somewhere on the other side of the Morn Mountains, the two forests really just one. Eisa had felt that way too. Lillias and she, just one spirit shared between two bodies.

  “Look at it, Eisa, it’s beautiful!”

  Lillias held up her hand. On it perched a dragørfly as big as her thumb, displaying the nine false warm-pink eyes, four right, five left, that adorned its wings. Glossy blue and yellow horns sprouted from its head and swept back along its thorax, and Eisa’s semiconscious mind realized it resembled a much less threatening version of the Himmingazian slangarook Griggory had ridden.

  “Gorgeous, darling, like you,” she said. “Careful not to touch its wings. They are very fragile.”

  Lillias gave her a peck on the cheek and giggled quietly. “Softy,” she said, then swirled in a circle and danced toward the waterline, sending the dragørfly aloft.

  Eisa looked into the distance, something drawing her gaze there. Something…that felt wrong. “Come back, Lillias. Don’t get too near it.”

  Her lover turned and gave her a queer look, smirking with lips she’d painted as pink as the dragørfly’s wing spots, and Eisa momentarily wondered if it was a color Vaka Aster splashed all her most beautiful creatures with.

  Lillias asked, “Near what? The water?”

  She said something else, but Eisa wasn’t paying attention. That feeling was growing, dread creeping through her and swelling like a bubble that would burst and flatten everything it spattered. Her eyes swallowed the horizon, but she could see nothing. Halla twinkling off distant leaves, a shimmer of rainbow where an afternoon rain shower fell. That was all. Where was this feeling coming from?

  “Eisa?” Lillias said, facing her now. “What is it? What—” She stopped, and her head tilted backward. Her mouth opened wide as if to scream. Then, abruptly, she did, shrieking with a force that seemed as if it could split the heavens.

  Eisa tried to run to her, but she was rooted, unable to make her feet move. The cry continued, getting louder, impossibly loud. So full of fear and hideous hate that Eisa trembled.

  She jerked in her dream, waking herself up, and her eyes shot open.

  Disoriented, at first she didn’t know if she was still asleep. The room was darker now, some of the oil lamps having burned themselves nearly empty. Shuddering, she stayed put for a moment, trying to forget the dream and the ache it conjured. As well as the fear that seeped over her goosebumped flesh because of it.

  Movement in the near corner drew her gaze. A man. The Ecclesium was here, too.

  Eisa shot to her feet. “What are you doing here? It’s not yet High Halls.” She wasn’t sure if this was true but decided she didn’t care at the moment. She was not accustomed to being snuck up on, and her dream’s dark tendrils were still writhing beneath her skin.

  In the dim light, his eyes caught the lamps and glittered like roaches. He stepped toward Lillias, then faced Eisa fully. His bare arms, knotted with muscle, and the open chest of his tunic showed that none of his physical strength had diminished in his middle age. But Eisa felt no concern. She could best him—was looking forward to it—even if she had to do it weaponless and with the use of only one hand. One didn’t live to her advanced age and not know every possible way a fight could go, every move an opponent might make.

  Finally, he spoke. “I’m here to offer you this chance, one chance, Nazarian, to join me instead of fight me.”

  She snorted. “Never took you for a coward, Starkas.”

  In one of the few times she’d witnessed, his expression morphed from a flat, all-powerful, unquestionable gaze to a rictus of pure fury. No longer checking his substantial baritone, he raged, “You knew it, didn’t you? Knew and did nothing. Vaka Aster first abandoned us, Eisa, then let herself be shackled by her own creation, her own servant! And you remained loyal? To both your desecrator of a Stallari and to the creator who mocks us with her frailty? Do not dare question my courage. I have just seen for myself that it’s true. Ulfric Aldinhuus is a faithless, broken vessel and a liar.”

  So—somehow he knew. Eisa felt herself grow numb, her mind stepping away from her body to observe and control what came next. “What do you want, Starkas?”

  Taking a moment to rein in his fervor, he reached a hand toward Lillias’s body and ran his fingers along the hem of her robe. Eisa had to force herself not to rush to him and yank it away. “What I want is for the people of greatest allegiance and devotion to the Verity we’ve served without question or benefit to finally have what is owed us.”

  “Blasphemer,” she spat. “Where is your faith? None of us is owed anything by our maker.”

  His voice lowered in mock placation. “My faith hasn’t gone anywhere. My faith is in the rule and order of the most powerful beings in all the Cosmos. The makers, those who both create and abide their own creations. Those who give us our will—and who share it.”

  “And who is it you think shares your will?” But she knew, didn’t she? The way Starkas had avoided her question about the prisoner in the vaults when she’d met with him yesterday—was that prisoner a Ravener? And if a Ravener had escaped Battgjald before it ceased to be, he or she must still live. They could still serve as a corporeal vessel for Balavad to walk in. And Balavad knew what had happened to Vaka Aster and Ulfric, had probably filled Starkas’s mind with the truth and hints of reward for helping Balavad fulfill his original purpose. Now, the usurper had control of the Domine Ecclesium—and Dyrrakium’s army.

  She let her tone simmer with the same fury as his. “You speak as if you’ve sold your faith like a lowly commoner. What did you get for it? A pat on the head? The promise of becoming a puppet ruler in his realm?” She lowered her own voice to mock him back. “Did Balavad not tell you? Battgjald is as much dust as memory. There is no Battgjald anymore. Vaka Aster destroyed it. As she will destroy you, if I leave anything for her to. What good is your faith now?”

  Disquietingly, he didn’t so much as blink at her taunting. “Why,” he asked, “would I want a kingdom in Battgjald when I have two more besides Dyrrakium in Vinnr to command? Before the War of Rivening, Vinnr was unified. Why can’t it be again?

  “Now, Nazarian, because you are my kin and you are, or were, a loyal Dyrrak, you have a choice. Will you take your place with me in leading this world to the faith it has forsaken and give fealty to a Verity who won’t forsake us, or will you be like Vaka Aster and turn your back on your own people?”

  He was here somewhere, the usurper, in the citadel. She had to warn the others. Channeling with a fervency she hadn’t felt since she’d been a novice, she tried to reach out to the Knights—but something was wrong. She glanced down. Her Mentalios was gone. For the first time, she felt the worm of fear wiggle at the base of her skull. Without her wystic lens, she could not summon her klinkí stones. How could the fallen Ecclesium have been that stealthy? No one had ever been able to take such advantage of her while she slept before.

  That left only one option, then. The fastest way to get to others was often through whoever was trying to stop you. She reached for her dagger, but it too had been stripped from her. It didn’t matter. She had all she needed with her fists and feet.

  “I think, Ecclesium,” she said, “your days of ruling have come to their end sooner than you expected,” and charged him.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  “I’ll see you soon, my love, I promise,” Jaemus to
ld Cote.

  The Himmingazian captain was sitting up on his pallet, his complexion smoother and healthier than it had been at any point while in Vinnr. Around them, the other Glisternauts spoke and laughed with each other for the first time without inhibition or illness since reaching this realm. If any balm could soothe more than seeing your friends back in the pink of health after fearing for days you’d lose every one of them, Jaemus didn’t care. This sight alone was enough. Except for this one last seemingly insurmountable obstacle he was about to face…

  Cote took Jaemus’s hands. “You look so worried, Jae. But you don’t need to. We’ve gone over this already. If you’re not back in three days, we’ll simply have the leader of the Knights send us after you. This healing sorcery of his is, well, I’ve never felt better.”

  “Then come with me,” Jae said. He was stalling, and he was scared. The only thing he wasn’t sure of was whether he was more afraid of leaving his friends here in this radically unpredictable place or of taking them back to a home that was slowly disintegrating, and which he had no assurance he could fix.

  “You don’t need to be watching over thirty-odd Glisternauts while you’re trying to fulfill your destiny.” Cote smiled like a rake, and it plus the way he so clearly enjoyed taunting Jaemus reassured him that his lifemate was back to normal more than anything else could.

  Cote had always found Jaemus’s vain certainty that he would be the one to lift Himmingazian from its woes a bit too high-blown. And for the first time in Jaemus’s life, he was equally lacking in confidence in himself. But Cote followed up his jaunty grin with a serious look. “You’re the one who can do this, Jae. Only you. I believe in you.”

  Jaemus leaned in and hugged him with his whole body. They remained that way for several moments, then Cote gently extracted himself. “It’s about time to find your new captain. Or Stallari is the term, I suppose. I’m sure I’ll always be your only captain.”